Carlson uncannily captures the complexity of his characters' inner lives.

    They are stories about the woods, houses hidden in the gaps between mountains. Behind them, the skeletons of old and powerful machines rust into the slate and leaves. Water red with iron leeches from the empty mines and pools near a stone foundation. The boy there plays in the bones because he is a child and this will be his childhood. He watches while winter comes falling slowly down over the road. Sometimes he remembers a girl, her hair and the perfume she wore. These are stories about her and where she might have gone. He waits for sleep because in the next story he will leave. The boy watches an airplane blink red past his window. From here, you can't hear its violence.

    Bawdy, funny, touching, and downright outrageous, there's simply no one else like Roald Dahl.This volume is a diabolical collection of 28 of Dahl's best stories. Shiver to classics like The Man From the South, Taste, Royal Jelly and The Great Switcheroo and hard-to-find gems like Poison, The Wish and Neck. It's the perfect remedy for a sleepless night. From Someone Like YouTasteLamb to the SlaughterMan from the SouthThe SoldierDip in the PoolGalloping FoxleySkinPoisonWishNeckSound MachineNunc DimittisGreat Automatic GrammatizatorClaud's DogRatcatcherRumminsMr HoddyMr FeaseyFrom Kiss KissLandladyWilliam and MaryThe Way Up to HeavenRoyal JellyGeorgy PorgyGenesis and CatastropheEdward the ConquerorPigChampion of the WorldFrom Switch BitchGreat SwitcherooLast ActBitch

    The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord. In the second of his stories published in a New Yorker special fiction issue, Akpan takes us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda. The story is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents. They are asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. This singular collection will also take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa. Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent.

    VERA & LINUS is a series of short sketches. The book's theme is the love between the two protagonists, Vera and Linus. They are mischief makers and tricksters of the most daring sort, and they are constantly up to no good, but the language holds them with a clear restraint, a restraint born perhaps out of the peculiar nature of their love, a love both for each other and the things of the world. Their mastery, and shifting natures allow them to compel the workaday world as they see it, but not to rule over each other, and so their game begins, as Vera struggles to outwit Linus, and Linus to outwit Vera.

    From the beach towns of Normandy to the streets of New Orleans, these thirteen vignettes introduce us to a covetous French painter, a sleepless wanderer of the night, a guitar-playing gypsy, and a host of others who yearn for and dive into the turbulent depths of romantic experience.

    This collection focuses upon the land he knew and loved so well—Normandy. Its people and its countryside are portrayed here in vivid colour and with great warmth. Amusing, saucy, and sometimes even farcical they may be, but they are also capable of great pathos, often branching off to end tragically. It is this skilful and affecting blend of tragedy and comedy, of tears and laughter, which make Maupassant's Normandy Stories the enduring favourites they are today.11 stories:Disc 1. In the country - Pierrot - A Normandy joke - A cock crowed - Old Boniface's crime - The confession - Disc 2. An apparition - The little cask - The castaway - Bombard - Master Belhomme's beast.

    One truth begets another as a passionate tale of confrontation in a San Francisco restaurant travels from eyewitnesses to others. Each protagonist views the attack through an emotion-stained lens, the story taking on a life of its own as filtered through different individuals' pasts, present and futures. Each character unweaves and re-braids their hidden truths, and exposes a chain of inner mysteries that binds them."Karmic truth, the effect of our decisions with our secrets and our deepest loves, comes back and squeezes the hearts of these characters. The elegant, super-rich, super-accomplished African-Americans in Keeper of Secrets are as susceptible as anyone to conflicting passions, ones that may not be reconcilable in this world... Floyd pulls the reader into their lives without mercy." --Clive Matson, author of Let the Crazy Child Write! and First Ten SongsA linked novel centered around the inhabitants of a wealthy enclave of African Americans in the Bay Area. An attempted murder transforms each character. Told from eight different perspectives.

    Ranging from the gothic South to the chic East Coast, from rural children to aging urban sophisticates, all the unforgettable places and people of Capote’s oeuvre are here, in stories as elegant as they are heartfelt, as haunting as they are compassionate. Reading them reminds us of the miraculous gifts of a beloved American original.

    The author attempts to capture the personalities of rural America, shaped by poverty, cruelty and an odd compassion.

    How did he allow the other person to die? How did he help the other person to hang himself to death? He was terribly upset about this. The moment his eyes saw a rope in any form he used to remember everything.........

    When first hardship and then nuclear war devastate a suburban neighborhood one woman is the key for survival of the community.

    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes A Scandal in Bohemia 3 Chapter 1 5 Chapter 2 16 Chapter 3 27A Case of Identity 31The Red-Headed League 51The Boscombe Valley Mystery 77The Five Orange Pips 103The Man with the Twisted Lip 125The Blue Carbuncle 151The Speckled Band 175The Engineer's Thumb 203The Noble Bachelor 227The Beryl Coronet 251The Copper Beeches 279The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Silver Blaze 309The Yellow Face 337The Stockbroker's Clerk 359The Gloria Scott 379The Musgrave Ritual 399The Religate Squires 421The Crooked Man 443The Resident Patient 463The Greek Interpreter 485The Naval Treaty 507The Final Problem 543Questions, Questions, Questions, by Arthur Pober, Ed.D. 565About the Author, About the Illustrator 569

    Whatever their differences in mood or effect, they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my still-uncompleted series about the Glass family. It struck me that they had better be collected together, if not deliberately paired off, in something of a hurry, if I mean them to avoid unduly or undesirably close contact with new material in the series. There is only my word for it, granted, but I have several new Glass stories coming along ? waxing, dilating ? each in its own way, but I suspect the less said about them, in mixed company, the better. Oddly, the joys and satisfactions of working on the Glass family peculiarly increase and deepen for me with the years. I can't say why, though. Not, at least, outside the casino proper of my fiction.

    Ranging from urgently contemporary London and Dublin to New York's Lower East Side in the nineteenth century, from dark comedy to poignancy, from the wryly provocative to the quietly beautiful, these stories offer a gathering of dreamers and lost souls who contend with the confusions of living. Here are men without women, children parenting parents, residents of the Broke-bank Mountain that is Ireland after the Celtic Tiger, emigrants, travellers, cheats and lovers, families, friends and foes. The focus is on those moments of the everyday when possibility seems to appear. A football match becomes an occasion of hard-won acceptances. An old acquaintance re-encountered plays mind-games in a bar. A fling between people who have almost nothing in common alters their lives forever. In Dublin, a desperately ill woman meets a tour guide in a hotel. A civil servant drives his father into Wicklow to say a final goodbye. A boy comes of age in a seaside town where everything is about to change. Where Have You Been? is a powerfully moving, entertaining and life-affirming read, from the internationally acclaimed author of Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls and Ghost Light.